A reader of Raskrinkavanje contacted us on Facebook and sent us a link to an article published by a website Saznajemo, asking if the news in the article was true.
The forwarded article was published on November 29, on a website Saznajemo, featuring the following headline:
Look at the punishment of Allah! This man had set Quran on fire in Norway (PHOTO)
The whole article consists of two short sentences and one photo:
Look at the punishment of Allah!
This man had set Quran on fire in Norway (PHOTO)
Saznajemo is the only website in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) languages to publish this article. However, the photo has been circulating on social media and was published on several private Facebook profiles and pages, including the pages of Bošnjačka TV Novi Pazar and Ne gubi nadu u Allahovu milost.
Google’s search of the photo led us to an article published in September this year on the website called AFP Fact Check, which analyzes similar articles published in other languages.
AFP’s analysis deals with articles and social media posts that only feature the photo of a man lying in a hospital bed. According to this analysis, articles and social media posts featuring the photo, along with a caption “the man who burned the Quran”, have been circulating the internet since 2017 in different languages, primarily Indonesian.Â
In this version of the story, the man’s fingers from the photo reportedly “turned black and fogged up, and started to decay” after “burning the Quran”. These articles also contained a claim that the man’s wounds had “an unpleasant odour”.
These articles and social media posts are still being shared today, but the identity of the person or other details of the alleged event was never even mentioned in any of them.
According to AFP findings, the information that a man from the photo burned the Quran is false, and the person in the photo is actually a man from Oregon, called Paul Gaylord.Â
The story about this man was published by The Guardian seven years ago, that is, in 2012: “Paul Gaylord is no longer in critical condition, but there are fears for his fingers and toes after he had been bitten by a cat from which he received the plague, caused by Yersinia pestis bacteria.”
“I was in a coma for 27 days, and during this period my hands and feet swelled up and began to turn black”, Gaylord said in an interview to The Guardian two years later.
The author of the first photo, which was published by the website Saznajemo, brought this story to life by adding another photo to that of a man in a hospital bed.
The added photo actually shows the leader of the Stop Islamization of Norway (SIAN) group, Lars Thorsen. This group organized an anti-Islamic gathering in the Norwegian city Kristiansand on November 16, 2019. During the gathering, two copies of the Quran were thrown in the trash, while Lars Thorsen had burned one copy.
Paul Gaylord, the man from the other photo, has nothing to do with Lars Thorsen or burning the Quran in Norway.Â
Based on this, we rate Saznajemo’s article as fake news.
(raskrinkavanje.ba)
